Category Archives: Leadership

We go through life discovering things about ourselves all the time, don't we. As a child we discover how far we can push our parents before we get a clip round the ear. At school we discover we're not the cool kid and when we're down we discover who our real friends are.

Then at work, we're rewarded with the lofty role of leading and quickly discover it's a rather tricky one and we need some help.

The good news here is you're not alone and there's a ton of help out there. The bad news is there's so much help (Amazoncurrently has 149,121 Leadership books!) that it becomes a confusing, time consuming chore.

So let's cut the confusion and the time and crack on with discovering your primary leadership style!

Start by taking a quick look at the model above showing 8 leadership styles.
Underneath this model are two axes. One runs from north to south and the other from east to west.

Discover now!

1 Look at disc 1. above and place yourself at the end of the axis that sounds most like you.2. Look at disc 2 and do the same.3. Now you've identified yourself on both axes go back to the model and discover your leadership style!

Now you know you style but what does it mean about you in the workplace?

I hope you now have you a big-picture sense of how this model can help you bypass some of the trial and error often involved in leadership growth.

Leading people is a social skill which requires you to connect with people around you to develop relationships and co-operation.

To achieve this you’ll need to practice using more styles because a one dimensional approach isn’t enough to help you reduce how often you jump to conclusions and make poor judgement calls.

Discovering your primary leadership style using this 3 step method is a very quick method to get you started.

But to get a more accurate assessment and become a multi-dimensional leader simply jump on the phone and give me a call or email me at jon@advancingbusinesspeople.co.uk for a free short on-line assessment to discover leadership style!

Best regards, Jon

Notes: This blog follows on from last weeks which is right hereand this model is taken from the book, 8 Dimensions of Leadership: DiSC Strategies for Becoming a Better Leader, which you can get from me.

What's your leadership style? Okay, that may be an unfair question to ask so early in this article. However, to be an effective leader we need to know our strengths. Plus, it's helpful to know how we developed our own unique approach to this role. So that's where we'll start.

Subconsciously we learnt about leading from a very early age. We watched our teachers, Scouts leaders and older relatives and noted good examples of their leadership. We also noted some that were not so good and thought 'I won't do that when I'm in charge!'

Then in the workplace we noted more examples plus we worked hard and are finally rewarded with this key business position. However, the chances are that despite all this experience, many of us are still not prepared for our new role.

We're now expected to plan, make tough decisions, manage resources and then it gets complex. You'll have to delve into the messy world of people! You have to manage, inspire, motivate and delegate.

To begin with you'll use your natural style, and that's fair enough because that's what you know. But unfortunately your default style will only get you so far. This is because your team is made up of unique individuals with different needs that you'll have to meet.

There's lots of quotes and evidence to support the need for top notch people skills and here's the Carnegie Institute's findings: 15% of success is due to tech skills, 85% is due to people skills.

So, in order to connect better with others what do you do? You need to go beyond your autopilot approach and discover new behaviours. And there's good news here because you are not trapped in your leadership style, you can break free! You can choose other ways of thinking and behaving in your role from today onwards.

There's good news here too. Psychologists, business consultants and experts have devised theories, models and frameworks for us to use. And that's what we're going to do next week, take a simple framework that will help you lead better, whatever you level.

You'll discover your own primary leadership style so you can connect better with your others, lead with success to create a healthy organisation and beat your competition too!

However, if you're a man on a mission (or lady of course) a week is a long time, so call me now and discover your leadership style today!

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Advancing Business people are a professional skills development company based in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. We help companies and individuals achieve results from greater understanding of themselves, and others to foster better working relationships and collaboration.